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And Luke and I – we’re fine.

We are exquisitely fine. We’re so fine it’s clinical. We eat dinner and talk about our days, we watch the tv shows we’ve always watched together, we function as a couple beautifully, and we have not once touched the thing in the middle of the table.

Halloween made everything worse. The walk-up never had trick-or-treaters but a brownstone has a stoop, and brownstone Brooklyn treats Halloween as a municipal art form. I bought full-size bars, because we are not monsters. Luke got home at 17:50 and did the door in his scrubs, and every child on the block assumed it was a costume and rated it highly, except for one who told him it looked fake and he needed to do better next year. Three hours. Dinosaurs. Ghosts. A pirate who negotiated with the end of his cutlass. And at 19:15, a little boy no older than four in tiny scrubs with dinosaurs all over them, stethoscope and all, who looked up at my husband like he’d found his people, and held up his pumpkin bucket, and said, “Trick or treat, Mr. Doctor, sir.”

Luke gave him three full-size bars. He didn’t look at me for the rest of the night, and I didn’t look at him, and we washed the bowl in silence at 21:00 like two people handling evidence.

Neither mother called or visited that night. They didn’t need to. The doorbell did their campaigning for free.

I am a psychiatry resident. I sat with a fifteen-year-old today and clocked her armour in nine seconds. It has taken me twenty-one days to admit that the reason my husband is picking up extra shifts isn’t the schedule.

He’s hiding in the one building where nobody can ask him how he feels.

I stage the intervention on a Thursday, in the kitchen, armed with espresso and a printed document, because I’ve learned from the masters and the masters use folders.

Luke comes down at 06:40 in his scrubs, sees the two cups, the folder, and me sitting at the island with my hands folded, and stops in the doorway.

“No,” he says.

“You don’t know what it is yet.”

“You’re sitting like your mother. Whatever’s in the folder, no.”

“It’s two nights in the Hamptons.”

He crosses to the counter and picks up his espresso, which I count as entering negotiations. “Preston.”

“Friday to Sunday. The house is empty this time of year. I already checked.”

“The house,” Luke says, in the voice he uses for my family’s real estate – careful, like the words are sharp on one side. “The estate, you mean. The one with grounds.”

“It has grounds the way our place has a garden. It’s a scale question.”

“Your family’s beach house has a name, Preston.”

“Every house out there has a name. It’s a zoning requirement.” This is not true and he knows it’s not true, and the corner of his mouth doesn’t move, which tells me how far under he actually is, because that line usually earns me something. I put the performance down. It takes conscious effort, like setting down something heavy. “Luke. Look at me.”

He looks at me.

“I’m not trying to fix you, or bribe you,” I say. “Well – sexual bribery remains on the table, that offer stands in perpetuity, but it’s not what this is. I’m not staging a conversation with a view. I’d just like my husband back for forty-eight hours, and I can’t get him here, because here has a room upstairs that neither of us will walk past without flinching, and a fish that sings, and a fridge with our contract on it, and every single object in this house is currently saying the thing we’re not. I want to take you somewhere that isn’t listening.”

Luke holds the espresso and doesn’t drink it.

“I have shifts,” he says.

“Rodriguez owes you four separate favours. I’ve heard you list them.”

“The wine cellar in that house is bigger than the apartment I grew up in.”

“Yes,” I say, because the worst thing I could do right now is tell him what he sees isn’t there. “It is. I can’t make it smaller. But nothing in it is the point. The point is forty-eight hours where the only person keeping score is the ocean.”

He’s quiet for a long moment.

“Elena,” he starts.

“Will watch the house,” Elena says, from the stairs, where she has apparently been conducting surveillance for an unknown period with a box of Cap’n Crunch under her arm. “Go. Please, both of you, go. You’ve been circling each other like figure skaters for three weeks and it’s exhausting. I’ll water the garden and feed the fish.”

“The fish is battery-operated,” I say.